@madpilot makes

Here we are again at Web Directions and the drinking, erm, learning has begun.  Last night, we had Port80 Sydney at the Quarryman Hotel which was conveniently across the road from our hotel. The usual Perth suspects where there (as was expected, most of them are staying at the same hotel across the road) but we also had a number Port80 noobs who can along, probably for the free beer. Unknown to us, the Quarryman has a quiz night on a Wednesday night, so we entered two Port80 teams, one of which can second!

Once again, Grant and I were up to our usual shenanigans, and we decided to ignore the advice of the others and headed to a late night pub until 3am, so I’m feeling a tad seedy now. BUT that dd mean I managed to get some sleep last night. Unfortunately, the friendly barkeep failed to mention that they had redirected M4 motorway to flow right next to my room. At about 5:30 it seems that every truck in NSW drives along Harris St, which has a metal plate in the room which plays an ever so sweet drumming noise as said heavy vehicles drove over them. Nice.

Anyway, we have now managed the get to the conference proper and we are just over half-way through the first day. We started off with Rashami Sinha from Slideshare speaking about the perils of popularity. It was very oriented around the different types of social networking. It is scary how many Facebook users there were in the room. I’ll rant about Facebook shortly.

I next went to Andy Clarke awesome talk where he looked at how web designers can steal techniques from comic books. Andy is an awesome speaker which I was silly enough to miss last year – but I’m glad I made it this time around. His slides were beautiful and he presented so smoothly. Enough gushing.

I wanted to see Cameron Adams, but the room was so full (there were people sitting in the hall) so I went and hung out with Rose and Adrian.

Now I’m sitting in John Allsopp‘s talk about the future of the web – looks like we agree – the mobile web is going to be the next big thing. I’m seriously thinking about going out to buy an iPod touch when they get released tomorrow so I can get developing on some serious mobile web sites.

Right, getting motivated – will probably start cutting some code soon :)